Children shouldn’t be for sale

By The Christian Post

As you walk through communities in Thailand and India where the sex industry is prevalent, you see young girls — some not even teenagers yet — standing on the street corners or near bars. This should not be the case.

Children should not be for sale.

But when their culture tells them this is normal, that it’s their duty, they feel they have no other choice.

The phrase “human trafficking” often brings to mind girls locked in a shady hotel room or being transported in a dark, dingy tractor-trailer. But many of those working in the booming global sex industry are trapped in an invisible cage — a life devoid of choice.

Girls in Thailand and parts of India are often taught it will be their responsibility to financially provide for their families. For those who can’t afford schooling, that often means a life in the sex industry. Instead of a pimp or madam holding them captive, it’s their own guilt and sense of obligation that forces them to sell their bodies every night.

But boys can be victims of the sex industry, too. If a boy’s mother is a sex worker, she often has to bring clients to her one-room home. Having strangers in the house puts him in danger of being exploited. Plus, he will slowly come to believe the sex industry is normal, making it more likely that he will become an abuser himself someday.

For most of us, hearing about modern-day slavery elicits a sense of powerlessness and despair. At times, the problem can seem so big — millions of women and children trapped in an endless cycle of exploitation — that we may believe it unsolvable.

I know I have felt that way … but then I think of the stories of girls like Hamsika, and I’m reminded that even in the middle of darkness, we can find hope.

As Hamsika visits the village where she grew up, all the little girls stop and watch her.

Her head is held high, and her steps are sure. She is different from the others — she has gone further in school than any girl in this impoverished village.

Hamsika, whose name we’ve changed for privacy, was once at risk of entering a life in the sex industry. Her parents are poor and thought that if their daughter became a sex worker like many of the other girls in their village, then they could finally be rich.

After all, the sex industry is “normal” among the Banchara people of India. A 500-year-old tradition known as nari matadictates that the eldest daughter of each family must sell her body from a very young age to pay for her brothers’ marriage dowries. Many other girls enter the industry, too, simply to support their extremely impoverished families.